A femto cell base station is a cellular base station configured for a small cell, or coverage area, examples of which include a residence, a small business, a building, or a small area. As such, the femtocell base station, such as for example a home base station (HNB) or a home E-UTRAN (evolved Universal Mobile Telecommunications System Terrestrial Radio Access Network) Node B base station (HeNB), may have functionality similar to a typical base station, such as an E-UTRAN Node B (eNB) base station, but the femtocell base station may have less range and power given its limited coverage area. For example, the femtocell base station may have power sufficient for a cell serving wireless devices within a limited range of about tens of meters.
Pico cell base stations are another example of a small cell base station, but pico cell base stations have somewhat greater range serving a small area on the order of about 100-200 meters. Accordingly, wireless service providers view the femto cell base station and the pico cell base station as a way to extend service coverage into a small cell, as a way to offload traffic to the femto cell/pico cell base station, and/or as a way to provide enhanced service, such as higher data rates and the like, within the small cell, when compared to the larger macro cell served by a typical base station, such as the eNB base station.
A user equipment may determine its mobility state, such as whether the user equipment moves at a high, medium, or other rate. The mobility state for a given user equipment may be determined in order to adjust various values associated with, for example, hand over, cell re-selection, and the like. For example, a user equipment that is highly mobile may move through a cell at a high rate of speed. This high mobility may impact the service provided to the user equipment with respect to the re-selection of cells (when the user equipment is in an idle mode) and hand over (when the user equipment is in a connected state). For example, if the highly mobile user equipment uses one or more values which are the same as those used for a less mobile user equipment, the network may command a hand over to a cell which no longer serves the highly mobile user equipment. Indeed, these concerns are only exacerbated in so-called heterogeneous networks that include macro cells, pico cells, femto cells, or a combination thereof.